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In death, if not exactly in life, Charles Dickens was the Michael Jackson of his day: a nation, and world, erupted into spontaneous and prolonged mourning when he died in London in 1870.

Dickens, too, had an unconventional family arrangement (though his children all appear to have been fathered by him, not his dermatologist); he forced his his wife, Catherine, to live apart from him for the final 12 years or so of their marriage, while he developed a close friendship with a young actress more than 25 years his junior, and Dickens issued a statement to the press declaring Catherine an unfit wife and mother — justifying their separation to his adoring public, which would have been scandalized by a divorce.

Just before she died, Catherine told her daughter Kate to give the letters Charles had written her to the British Museum, “so the world may know that he loved me once.” It was the discovery of these letters that led first-time British novelist Arnold to fictionalize a wonderfully rich account of Catherine and Charles’ life, told from Catherine’s perspective.

The tale opens upon the death of the eminent author Alfred Gibson, a stand-in for Dickens. His estranged wife, Dorothea, is conflicted: she mourns her husband, and yet resents him for his heartless separation from her. When Dorothea starts opening her letters of condolence, she discovers one from Queen Victoria, who asks her to tea at Buckingham Palace — which leads to her leaving her rooms for the first time in 10 years. Suddenly Dorothea embarks on a journey of reconciliation with her estranged family members.

In the decade since she stopped going outside, London has changed, and in this new, beautiful city, Dorothea sees the chance to reinvent her own life too.